Fender Champion 100 Review

I have to admit that I’m a fan of Fender Blackface tones. The Fender Blackface amps are the amps made by fender in the 60s. The amps were produced in various wattages, from 5 watts up to the extremely loud and heavy Twin Reverb at 100 watts. These amps today are very desirable and command relatively high prices if you were to buy one today. Lucky for the rest of us Fender has some really nice alternatives that you can buy today for a fraction of what one of those classic amps from 50 years ago will cost.

One of these new amps is the Fender Champion 100.
It borrows its name from a small amp Fender made back in the 50’s but the Champion 100 is all modern. Unlike a tube amp, it’s lightweight and really affordable for those on a tight budget. Even so, it packs 100 watts and two 12 inch speakers so it’s powerful enough for about any gig.

Easy to Use:

One of my main beefs with solid state amps or modeling amps is that they try to jam every feature and tone shaping option possible into the control panel and the result is a confusing amp that is not easy to deal with in real life playing situations.

The Fender Champion 100 has a little extra compared to an amp like a Fender Twin but it’s laid out in a clean way so you can dial in your tones without a bunch of fussing with knobs.

Two Channels:

There are two channels and they are laid out in a way that will seem familiar to anyone who has used a Fender Blackface or Silverface amp.

The first channel is designed to sound like a classic Fender Twin Reverb and does a good job in producing nice Blackface tones. Like a Blackface amp this channel has the familiar Volume, Bass and Treble controls. Where is differs from a Blackface amp is that it also includes a FX Level and FX select knobs. The effects you can choose from include the classic Fender Reverb as well as Delay/Echo, Chorus, Tremolo and Vibratone.

The second channel adds a few more options but in a straightforward way. One of the first things you’ll notice is that there is a Gain knob in addition to the Volume knob. The Gain knob will allow you to dial up some dirty tones to go along with the clean sounds in the first channel.

The other difference is that the second channel adds a voice control. This allows you to change the amp voicing to get, for example, a british tone. Blackface amps are known for a scooped mid tone but with the voicing control you can experiment with a variety of other sounds.

And there’s More:

The Fender Champion 100 an effects loop so you can incorporate your favorite outboard effects or pedals into you rig. The effects loop puts the effects after the preamp and before the power amp.

There is also a auxiliary input so you can plug in some sort of media player for practicing with backing tracks as well as a headphone jack for late night practicing. The amp also comes with a foot switch.

All in all it’s a really nice amp that offers a lot of Fender Tone and Value for not that much money.